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BNA > FNA – 4 November 2016

A week or two ago, the youth of First UMC Shelbyville asked our youth director, Alden Procopio, about the movie “Risen.” Alden thought – correctly – that she ought to see the movie before recommending it, so she and Rev. Lanita Monroe went earlier in the week. They liked it so much that Lanita sent out an e-mail blast inviting all ages, not just the youth, to attend the 4:15 Sunday matinee.

So I joined the group today, walking from the church to the theater and back again. The short review, which I’ll expand on below, is that I really enjoyed it – I thought it walked a fine line between an innovative approach and reverence to the source material.

I get frustrated with some of the ham-fisted attempts to put faith on film. Not surprisingly, three of the four coming attractions before tonight’s movie were faith-based. One of them, a fictional story about a teacher suspended for using a Bible verse in her classroom, seemed like a perfect example of what I normally don’t like in this genre. The movie (judging only from the trailer, which can be inaccurate) is really black-and-white, portraying the chief opponent as a one-dimensional villain and the teacher and her supporters as a persecuted minority. Any non-Christian would find it laughable and unconvincing, but non-Christians wouldn’t go see it in the first place. The movie is aimed at Christians – but its primary purpose (again, judging from the trailer) seems to be reinforcing how great we are and how nasty and evil anyone who disagrees with us is. The question of how and when faith can be expressed in taxpayer-funded public schools is a complicated one, and not always a matter of black and white, heroes and villains. But a more-nuanced treatment probably wouldn’t sell group tickets to churches.

Sorry; excuse me for getting off on a rant there. I only bring it up to contrast it with “Risen.”

Now, to be fair, any Biblical epic is going to suffer from a little bit of the same preaching-to-the-choir effect I described above. Few non-Christians are going to be interested, so any claims of evangelistic value are going to be wildly overstated. But I think a well-done Bible movie at least has some value in terms of inspiration. It certainly served that purpose from a couple of our youth, who said during the post-movie discussion back at the church that the movie had helped them imagine the crucifixion story.

By way of confession, about 10 years ago I tried to write a novel which was not unlike “Risen” in intent – it was supposed to tell the story of what happened to the disciples in between the crucifixion and the resurrection. I still have the incomplete manuscript; I gave it up because I decided I didn’t have the Bible scholarship to do it justice, and my original excuse that it was going to be “more like a parable than Bible history” was just that, an excuse.

“Risen” brings the story to life in a way which I found creative and reverent.

The story is told through the eyes of Clavius, a Roman tribune, played by Joseph Fiennes. Pilate (Peter Firth) sends a war-weary Clavius, who seems to be Pilate’s protégé, to the crucifixion site to break the legs of the three convicts and hasten their deaths. (If you remember the Bible story, you know that Jesus was already dead by that point and was pierced in the side instead.) Then, the next day, when the Judaean religious authorities complain to Pilate, Clavius is sent out to put Pilate’s personal seal on the tomb and post a couple of guards there.

Minor quibble: It’s sort of a Hollywood cliché that in movies, ancient Romans speak with upper-class British accents. But when working-class Roman soldiers are given working-class British accents (not Cockney, but something like that), it just sticks out like a sore thumb.

On the next day, the tomb is discovered to be empty – and Pilate commands Clavius to investigate, and to locate Jesus’ body in order to refute the rumor that he has somehow been resurrected.

This leads to what seems like a first-century police procedural, as Clavius and his newly-assigned deputy, Lucius (Tom Felton), track down rumors, dig up newly-buried bodies and try to intimidate everyone.

Clavius keeps telling people that he’s after the truth, and that he’ll allow them to go free if they’ll give him the truth. Eventually, of course, Clavius comes face-to-face with a truth he did not expect.

From that point forward, the movie changes in tone a little bit, bending the rules to depict Clavius as being present (albeit in the background) for several Bible scenes involving Jesus and the disciples. As long as you accept this as a work of inspirational fiction, and don’t take it too seriously, I’m fine with that. After all, as previously admitted, I tried to do the same thing. Think of it as “Ben-Hur” for the 21st Century.

The filmmakers do get several little details right. Jesus actually looks (gasp!) Middle Eastern, rather than like that blankety-blank Warner Sallman painting. The crucifixion wounds are in Jesus’ wrists, rather than his palms. If you tried to crucify someone by putting nails through their palms, the nails would tear through the flesh. Only by nailing just above the wrist – which still would have been considered the hand by the gospel writers – do you have the proper bone structure to hold someone on the cross for several days (which is how long crucifixions normally took). Clavius gives the disciple Bartholomew an accurate description of how crucifixion actually kills a victim – by suffocation. The victim must keep pushing his body up to breathe, and eventually, after days of agony, he gives up, exhausted, and is strangled by his own weight.

Rev. Lanita, in talking about the movie to the youth, lamented that they fell into the common trap of portraying Mary Magdalene as a prostitute, when the gospels don’t refer to her as such. (The idea that she was a prostitute comes from someone in church history speculating that she was the same woman who anointed Jesus’ feet, even though the Bible does not give us any specific reason to make that connection.)

It all seemed to work, at least for me. Fiennes is absolutely great as Clavius. You can feel his weariness, but then he shifts it aside and becomes an intimidating interrogator, and he makes his conversion – which, by the conventions of this type of movie, has to be somewhat sudden – believable. He still seems like the same person. With a lesser actor, this movie could have easily descended into camp.

Firth and Felton are also great on the Roman side, while Stuart Scudamore (running a close second to Cumberbatch in the silly name rankings) is quite good as Simon Peter (IMDb lists him as “Peter,” but he seems to be referred to mainly as “Simon” by the other characters). Stephen Hagan is just a tiny bit too giddy as Bartholomew, but I’ll let it slide – especially since the more-common mistake in Bible epics is to be universally-gloomy. This movie actually had a few moments of welcome and appropriate humor, such as one where one of the Romans makes a disparaging remark about the Jewish high priests just as we, the audience, see them approaching him from behind. There’s also a scene between Simon and Clavius late in the movie which incorporates some funny byplay.

I just really found the movie inspirational. I doubt many people who aren’t already believers will be converted by it, because I doubt they’ll go see it in the first place. But we probably shouldn’t expect movies to proselytize anyway. I think this is fine as a creative expression of faith, one which someone like me (and the teens from church) can simply enjoy on its own terms.

When I got home from work today, “Executive Suite” was on, and I watched I guess the last hour or so of it. I’d watched the whole thing once before.

It’s a 1954 movie, directed by Robert Wise and the debut of legendary screenwriter Ernest Lehman. I find it interesting because it is, or winds up being, a movie about capitalism, which is not a common topic for popular entertainment.

The movie was pitched as an all-star drama, and for most of the movie, it manages to be that. The long-time chairman of a major furniture manufacturer has died, and various parties are jockeying to take his place. At first, McDonald Walling (William Holden) is watching this from the sidelines, trying to figure out how changes at the company might affect him. He’s more interested in design and research than in the operatic backroom bargaining, and his wife (June Allyson, who seemingly always played the supportive wife) wants to encourage him to follow his passion as a designer, even if it means leaving Treadway Corp.

But Walling becomes dead-set against Loren Shaw (Frederic March) taking over the company. He sees Shaw as one of the forces that has led the company to cut back on research and innovation and to put out a shoddy product line in hope of short-term profit. The conflict between the two men turns into a climactic scene in the boardroom as the board gathers to vote on a new chairman.

Shaw believes that a company’s overwhelming responsibility is to its stockholders, period, and that means cutting out anything wasteful that might cut into the profit margin here and now. Walling argues, passionately, that the company has to take a longer-term approach. He argues that Shaw’s approach demoralizes the employees and ultimately destroys the company and harms the stockholders. He argues that there may be a place for a value-priced furniture line, but it should be based on innovation rather than simply on cutting corners and turning out a second-rate product. He invokes the company’s responsibility to its own employees and says that they need to produce a product of which they can be proud.

It’s a surprisingly academic discussion to be the climactic standoff of a Major Motion Picture, but it’s played with surprising passion. And the basic arguments are, if anything, even more relevant in 2016 than they were in 1954.

At the height of the Red Scare, a critique of American corporate culture apparently raised some eyebrows, so much so that, according to Ben Mankiewicz’s outro to the film, producer John Houseman (Professor Kingsfield from “The Paper Chase”) was asked to sign a loyalty oath. But this film is virtually a celebration of capitalism – it simply holds that there’s a good kind of capitalism, one which serves the customers (and values intangibles like pride of workmanship) because that’s in the long-term interest of the stockholders, and a bad kind of capitalism, one which puts too much emphasis on maximizing short-term profit without considering the long-term consequences.

I see that I already have a blog post tag for “Logan’s Run,” so I must have blogged about it at some point in the past. But I don’t feel like going back and looking.

The 1976 movie “Logan’s Run” is airing right now, as I type this, on Turner Classic Movies. I remember it from my adolescence, although I only saw it edited on network TV, not in the theaters. It was followed in September of 1977 by a TV series, a relatively short turnaround for that sort of thing. It was right in the wake of “Star Wars,” which had come out that summer, and studios and TV networks were snatching up anything science fiction-related.

The original novel by by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, which I’ve never read, was a Vietnam allegory, published in 1967. By 1976, Americans were trying to forget the war – well, except for “M*A*S*H,” which was as much about Vietnam as Korea. So the politics were played down, although the central allegory – young people sent off to die because that’s what the system demands — remains.

The movie is set in a post-apocalyptic domed city – a seeming paradise, in which you work only a few hours a week and there are a lot of leisure options. There’s just one catch, and it’s a doozy. When you are born, a crystal is implanted in your hand. As you approach your 30th birthday, the crystal changes color and you are summoned to “carousel,” a ceremony in which participants float up into the air and explode. (The TV series substituted the explosions with a less-disturbing effect that looked like the transporter on “Star Trek.”)

The public is told that carousel is simply a first step to reincarnation, but there are some, called “runners,” who doubt the official theology and try to evade their pre-ordained fate. There’s virtually no other type of crime, so there’s no regular police force, but there’s a special squad called the “sandmen” who track down such runners.

Our central character, Logan 5, starts the movie as a sandman and is sent undercover to infiltrate a sort of Underground Railroad for runners. He, too, begins to doubt the line about reincarnation, ultimately pitting him against his former partner, who considers him a cop-gone-bad and is obsessed with tracking him down, even outside the protection of the dome.

Logan was played by British Michael York in the movie, and then by all-American Gregory Harrison (of “Trapper John, M.D.”) in the TV series. Jenny Agutter was the female lead — a runner who befriends Logan — in the movie, followed by Heather Menzies in the TV show.

The movie features a very brief cameo by Farrah Fawcett, but by the time it was released she was starting to explode from “Charlie’s Angels” and that poster, and so some theaters even advertised “Farrah Fawcett-Majors in ‘Logan’s Run'” or what have you.

IMDb still lists a remake as being bounced around. At one time, it was supposed to star Ryan Gosling; now, it seems to be limbo.

I’d like to wish my little sister, Elecia, a happy birthday. As I noted in this blog post 10 years ago, you have to use discretion in this sort of thing, and it would be rude of me to talk about a lady’s age. So I’ll move along to other topics.

By the way, I certainly hope you enjoyed Super Bowl 50 on Sunday, along with viewers in all 50 states and many foreign countries. I’ve been watching the game for years, of course, ever since Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” was a hit on the radio. It was a good close game, and each team had a 50/50 chance of winning. They literally had a 50/50 chance of winning the coin toss — even though that was a specially-made commemorative coin and not a simple 50-cent piece.

I’m glad GoDaddy didn’t have a Super Bowl ad this year. Their ads are so salacious, it’s almost like watching “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

I’m sure that some people weren’t into the game, of course. Maybe some of them were watching the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore romantic comedy “50 First Dates.”

Now, of course, there will be months without football. People will have to satisfy themselves with other programming — like the police drama “Hawaii Five-O.”

But, getting back to my sister, I want to say how much I love her. She’s always been there for me. She’s a hard-working 9-1-1 dispatcher. She’s a mother of three wonderful children, and those kids were always her priority through thick and thin. She’s caring and big-hearted and thinks of everyone else first. I hope she has a very, very happy birthday, however old she is — and I can’t think of the specific number at the moment, but I’m sure it will come to me eventually.

When I first blogged about the online shopping site Jet back in August, it was being touted as a membership-based shopping site, a cross between Amazon and Costco or Sam’s Club. Few if anyone had actually bought a membership at that time, because the site – which had some heavy-hitting investors and the money to launch with a bang — was offering free trial memberships of three or six months. The stated premise was that the company would sell its goods more or less at cost and would make its money solely on the annual membership fees.

Soon after my blog post, the company announced that it was changing its concept a bit and would not be membership-based after all.

I placed a couple of orders with the company early on, about the time of my blog post, but then in the last quarter of the year I was busy with Christmas shopping and my personal shopping was sort of on a day-to-day basis.

But since the first of the year, I’ve ordered from them a couple of times under the new model. I don’t think the discounts are quite as deep as they were under the old model – although it’s hard to compare, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment – but they’re still good, and if you have never used the site and have any interest in making routine household purchases online it’s worth checking out.

I did have one glitch with my most recent order – and I’ll explain that in a moment, too – and it’s a cautionary tale but not a deal-breaker.

The way Jet works is that they try to have low, competitive basic prices on household goods – some in bulk quantities, others in individual quantities – but on top of those competitive prices, there’s a discount formula that rewards you for putting more and more items in your shopping cart during a given order. The first item you decide to buy goes into your cart at its basic price, then the second item goes in at its regular price less a small discount, then the next item gets a slightly larger discount, and so on.

This rolling discount plan can save you money – but it also makes it harder for you as a shopper (or for Jet’s competitors) to comparison shop for one specific item.

Any purchase over $35 gets free shipping (and it’s fast shipping, except as explained below), and I believe that threshold is measured before the discounts are applied, which is good news for the buyer. (I know that was the case last fall, but I haven’t tested it recently.) You also get a discount for using a debit card (which I would do anyway) or by waiving the free-return policy for certain low-cost household items that you probably wouldn’t try to send back anyway.

But here’s the thing. Jet has a seamless ordering process, but (sort of like Amazon), some of its products are being sold directly by Jet, others are being sold by other partner sites. Some of the items from partner sites may have slower shipping and use different carriers. Your order may arrive in several different pieces – some directly from Jet, some from its partner merchants.

The glitch I wrote about earlier had to do with one of those partner sites. On my most recent order, I found what was clearly described as a new, original-manufacturer Canon ink cartridge for my printer, and the photo which accompanied the item was of the authentic Canon packaging. The price was good, so I ordered the cartridge. But when it arrived today, it turned out to be a remanufactured cartridge from a third party. I’ve bought remanufactured cartridges before – in fact, I have two in the printer right now – but that’s not what I ordered this time, and I could probably have gotten a remanufactured cartridge just as cheaply, or for even less, from any number of other sources.

Fortunately, Jet has good customer service. I had not waived my free-return rights on this item, and so within seconds I had printed out a pre-paid FedEx label for returning the cartridge. They will refund the money to my debit card once it arrives. That process was automated, but I also sent an e-mail to the company complaining about what I considered a deliberately-deceptive listing by one of Jet’s partner sites. I received a quick response promising that they would look into the matter, but that’s easy to say.

But that’s a glitch. All in all, I’ve been happy with my purchases from Jet and will continue to do business with them in the future. I suggest you check them out.

DISCLOSURE: For years, this site – like a lot of others on the web – has been part of the Amazon affiliates program. When I include an Amazon link for a product, and someone clicks on it and buys something from Amazon, I get a very small commission. I don’t make any significant amount from this – at times, it’s been years before I’ve gotten to the $10 threshold at which they deposit accumulated commissions into your checking account. My participation in this program does not affect the views I express or the topics I cover here, as evidenced by this post about one of Amazon’s competitors.

All of the moms of First United Methodist Church – Shelbyville teased me about whether or not I was ready to be a chaperone at Warmth In Winter, and carried on like I was making some great sacrifice by attending.

But I expected going in that I’d have a good time – and I did. It was a blessing, in a very real sense.

It’s a moving thing to see young people in the throes of some of their first religious experiences. Bishop Bill McAlilly, who preached this morning, recalled a church camp experience at which James Taylor’s “You’ve Got A Friend” was played, and I had to laugh – because one of the strongest memories of my own junior high church camp experiences has to do with Taylor’s “Shower The People.” “That’s not a church song,” I thought to my seventh grade self. “That’s a song from the radio. Are they allowed to do that?”

That camp experience is still potent in my memory, four decades later, and I always list it as a key part of my spiritual journey whenever I’m asked to lay out my spiritual timeline at some retreat or mission trip training event.

That’s where these kids were this weekend. How remarkable for them to get to go and be at a nice hotel with three thousand of their peers, and see a Christian band play with rock-concert-style staging — video screens, lighting and what have you.

The teens from Shelbyville First are a great group, and they really got out of this experience what you’d hope they would get out of it.

We know that one peak experience doesn’t guarantee a life of faith. Nothing guarantees a life of faith; faith has to be renewed on an hourly basis. In fact, during a breakout session on Saturday I and the other adults from First UMC heard some disheartening statistics about how many children who actively participate in their church youth groups lose their connection to the church just as soon as they get to college.

Bellarive, which was the worship band for this weekend’s event, has a song lyric that goes “You will never fade away / Your love is here to stay,” and while God’s love is faithful we are not always faithful to God.

That’s a challenge and an admonition to all of us in the church, but it does nothing to diminish the value of, or the need for, events like Warmth In Winter, or the week-in, week-out youth activities in a local church. We do not know whose heart might have been turned this weekend. Decades from now, some great Christian leader – maybe a member of the clergy, maybe a layperson whose faith has been reflected in a life well-lived – may look back to that weekend in 2016 when she stood up in front of the stage in the mosh pit, bouncing up and down to the music of Bellarive and swapping warm fuzzies with strangers from other churches.

In case you’ve missed my previous posts, Warmth In Winter, which started in 1982, is an annual youth weekend held by the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church. (Despite the name, the “Tennessee” conference is made up of Middle Tennessee.) It’s been held for the past several years at the Embassy Suites hotel and convention center in Murfreesboro, but it attracts thousands of teenagers and has outgrown even that facility. This year, for example, the Embassy Suites was sold out and there were church groups staying at several other hotels in the Medical Center Parkway area, plus some churches that just commuted. The Saturday morning programming had to be done in shifts – while the groups staying at the Embassy Suites were in breakout workshops, the groups staying off-site were in the main room for worship, and vice versa. Next year, Warmth In Winter will be held at Gaylord Opryland.

My nephew T.J. Carney was a member of one of the “design teams” that put on the event this year, and he appeared on stage a couple of times, in a skit and as a “stick figure dancer” (you had to be there). I could not be prouder. T.J.’s younger brother James also got to attend the event; they are both from Bell Buckle UMC.

So it was tremendously moving to see all the kids enjoying this experience and hope that it will have an impact on them down the road.

But I also enjoyed the programming directly. When you’re talking to teenagers, you don’t talk to them about nuances of theology, or socio-political implications, or textual criticism. Duffy Robbins, the keynote speaker for the event, had a three-point slogan upon which he based all three of his sermons: “God has a plan … Man has a problem … The choice is up to you.” Simple, clean and direct. Every now and then, even we adults need a message that cuts to the essentials and touches the heart.

Duffy Robbins, by the way, was terrific all around, with a sense of humor that appealed to everyone in the room. I found this on YouTube from 2014, but he did exactly the same routine this weekend:

He had a way of taking this simple story and making it come to life. A story about teaching his teenage daughter how to drive became a lesson on the Incarnation, and the need for God to be in the seat next to us. Just perfect.

I knew going in that I’d enjoy the program. I had seen enough slide shows from previous Warmth In Winter trips to have a basic sense of what the event was about. But as I posted Friday night, I wasn’t quite sure of my own role. I wasn’t rooming with the kids – that’s prohibited by United Methodist “safe sanctuaries” policies due to the risk. Our church’s director of children and youth, the wonderful Alden Procopio, does a great job with the kids, and so it’s not like I was needed to hand out stern looks. (The kids were great all weekend, really.) This was a suite hotel, and as the only adult male in the First UMC group I had a suite all to myself. I felt almost guilty for being there and enjoying the program.

After I wrote those words Friday night, a couple of things happened Saturday that made me feel better. We had a block of free time, and went to a nearby shopping area with a lot of food options. We gave the kids the freedom to go where they liked. Alden and the Three Moms – Vickie Hull, Tanya Lane and Rachel Cunningham – went with a few of the teens to a barbecue restaurant, but I tagged along with another group that went to Panda Express. Just being there, me and the teens hanging out, made me feel a little more like I was actually a chaperone and not just a tag-along. I sat with most of the same kids that night at the Murfreesboro District pizza party:

I also found out that I had to be there. The event’s policy required that if there were male campers, there had to be a male adult from that church (and, I assume, vice versa). If I hadn’t been there, Grayson and Kenny and Sam might not have been able to be there.

I bought myself a T-shirt on Saturday, but I joked about not buying another souvenir I really wanted. At a layspeaking class I took last November, I was amused at the John Wesley bobblehead doll brought along by the teacher. They had those bobbleheads at the Cokesbury table at Warmth In Winter this weekend, but I decided they were too expensive.

Today, on our way home, we all stopped for lunch at Toot’s South. After we’d eaten, as we were trying to consolidate the plates a bit, all of a sudden the four grownups with whom I was sitting started looking at me and handed me a white paper bag and an envelope.

The bag, as you’ve no-doubt guessed, contained this:

The envelope was even better – a card signed by the kids and the other adults thanking me for being there.

By the way, there’s a bad pollen problem inside Toot’s this time of year.

Terrific first night at Warmth In Winter.
As we were gathering for evening worship, there was a theatrical percussion group (along the lines of Stomp or Blue Man Group) called RePercussion, and they were terrific. Illusionist Jared Hall really only did one trick tonight, but I think we’ll see more of him tomorrow. Bellarive, the worship band, was great, and I really enjoyed the keynote speaker, Duffy Robbins, who was funny and relatable. Of course, none of this content is aimed at washed-up 53-year-olds; it’s aimed at youth, and there were 3,000 of them in the ballroom tonight, and I think they were really connecting to all of it. Communion was led by the Rev. Skip Armistead, whom I knew briefly in the early 90s when I was serving on the Tennessee Conference singles council (he probably doesn’t remember me), and the Rev. Amanda Diamond of Morton Memorial UMC, a great friend of the Mountain T.O.P. ministry whose pulpit I’ve filled before. After the service, I saw Amanda along with Kylene McDonald at the T-shirt booth, and I’m always happy to see Kylene.
I got to see my nephew T.J., who is on the design team which is running this show, very briefly; he’d been here all day and was already tired, and that was before evening worship. T.J.’s brother James is also here; I haven’t run into him yet.
I’m happy to be here, but I guess I don’t feel that much like a chaperone yet. There’s not much for me to do other than be here, and there are a few of the teens that I’m not sure even know who exactly I am, and vice versa. I am here in this big old suite, which I have all to myself as the only adult male in our group. The boys are next door. In the old days, teens and adults would have bunked together, but that’s prohibited, and understandably so, by the new Safe Sanctuaries policies. So that’s good in terms of me getting a good night’s sleep, but I feel almost guilty for being here.

Although I love cooking, and there are some individual things I make that I’m proud of, there are certainly plenty of gaps in my kitchen abilities.

I have never been able to master fried chicken, for one thing. Both my mother and my paternal grandmother were great at it, but mine always winds up either burnt on the outside or so undercooked inside that it has to be sent to the microwave for emergency remedial cooking, while I worry about whether I’ve contracted anything from the first bite.

Tonight, though, it came out OK:

It was golden brown on the outside and fully cooked inside. I started it on medium heat and cooked it a while on either side with the lid on, then took the lid off and cranked up the heat to medium-high to get the nice crisp crust. I want to say that my mother did this the other way around, which is how I’ve usually tried to do it in the past, but I could never get mine to turn out like hers. This time, I decided to cook the chicken first, then finish by crisping the crust.

I didn’t do much to prepare the chicken. Had I thought about it in advance, and if I’d had buttermilk, I’d have done a buttermilk marinade. But this was a relatively last-minute meal. I’ve already blogged about the super-cheap leg quarters I bought Thursday at UGO and vacuum-sealed yesterday; this was me using up two thighs from the freezer from last time I bought chicken. I sprinkled the chicken generously on both sides with Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning before dredging it in plain flour. Alton Brown says that you should apply the seasoning, then the flour, rather than mixing the seasoning into the flour. This is for two reasons:

Some seasonings are subject to burning under high heat, and so hiding them under the crust protects them from the highest temperatures.

Spices are more expensive than flour, and if you season a whole batch of flour it means you’re needlessly throwing out seasonings with the excess flour at the end of the process. By sprinkling the seasoning directly onto the chicken, you use only the amount you need.

So that’s what I did. Who knows if it will turn out as well next time? Maybe I was just lucky.

Of all the good deals I’ve gotten at United Grocery Outlet – and I’ve gotten quite a few – yesterday may have taken the cake. They had 10 pound bags – 10 pounds! – of chicken leg quarters for $2.90 per bag. Naturally, I bought one. If only I had some way of individually vacuum-sealing each leg quarter so that I could freeze them for future use.

A week or so previous, I had bought a roll of Ziploc-brand bag material, hoping it would work as well with the FoodSaver as the official FoodSaver bags do. (The Ziploc product is labeled as working in major brand-name vacuum sealers.) The Ziploc bags were a little cheaper.

I did not, however, look at the Ziploc package as closely as I should; what I bought was a full-width roll, but it was seamed and perforated lengthwise so that if you cut off a foot-long portion of 11-inch-wide roll, you then tear it apart into two separate bags, each one 5 1/2 inches wide.

It wasn’t what I thought I’d purchased, and I didn’t realize that until today. But, serendipitously, it worked perfectly for what I was doing today. The narrow-width bags were perfect for housing one leg quarter each. I had planned to package two quarters per full-width bag, but instead I just packaged one quarter per half-width bag.

They looked like this:

I have 10 of those little pouches in the freezer now. That still left three leg quarters; I deboned those and am going to use the meat tonight for a box of Chicken Helper Ultimate Southwest Chipotle Chicken, which I also bought yesterday at UGO.

For 79 cents.

The bones from those last three leg quarters are in the pressure cooker right now being boiled down for broth. I was out of onions, so I just added some onion powder, poultry seasoning and red pepper flake.

All of this for $2.90, plus 79 cents. This is why I love going to UGO.

My mother died of pancreatic cancer in August 2010. I participated in my first American Cancer Society Relay For Life in June 2011, and now I am the community promotions chair for the Bedford County event. Click the logo above if you'd like to donate towards my participation.